Identity of the Literary Text ed. by Mario J. Valdés and Owen Miller, and: Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism ed. by Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker

Abstract

For now a trouble came into my mind From unknown causes. I was left alone Seeking the visible world, nor knowing why. (II, 266-78) The creative act may begin in intolerable aloneness, provided the possibility of being in touch has been imaginatively preserved in a germinal state. The critic’s response to such a partially self-explaining confessional passage as Wordsworth’s might be to reconstruct its psychobiographical context in the interest of enriching the statement. To picture the precise circumstances would hardly diminish the poet’s visionary presentation of it, and it would take us less quickly but more surely to an archetypal relevance. A n d r e w b r i n k / McMaster University Mario J. Valdes and Owen Miller, eds., Identity of the Literary Text (To­ ronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). xxi, 330. $14.95 Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker, eds., Lyric Poetry•' Beyond New Criti­ cism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 375. $12.95 These two volumes of essays mark the coming of age of literary theory in Canada. Boasting an impressive array of internationally known critics, each brings together a diversity of theoretical perspectives on a specific area of concern. Both books stem from symposia organized at the University of Toronto: Identity of the Literary Text from a series of lectures given during the academic year 1981-82 and Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism from a conference held in October 1982. The four editors, furthermore, are all at the University of Toronto; three of them (Miller, Parker, and Valdes) teach at its Centre for Comparative Literature. In such a “small world,” comparisons are inevitable, and our reading of one volume cannot help but affect our sense of the other. Identity of the Literary Text addresses, but does not resolve, questions raised by its ambiguous title. Does the title suggest the problem of textual identity or that of the text’s literariness? And what do we mean by “idendty ,” itself the potential subject for lengthy philosophical discussion? This indeterminacy about the topic lends an element of unpredictability to the debate. In his instructive introduction, Jonathan Culler opens with a cer­ tain uneasiness about the subject: “The topic of this collection of essays is especially intriguing because one is not certain precisely what is at issue” (3). This open-endedness licenses each critic to speak on a topic of choice, but the lack of direction produces individual performances rather than a 246 dialogue. The fact that the book came out of separate lectures and not a conference may partly explain this impression of isolated utterances. The essays are, to be sure, generally compelling, and Owen Miller’s preface dis­ plays a fine awareness of the different asumptions the contributors make about texts. Still, the volume lacks a sense of dialogue and a context that would bring together the variety of positions represented (Marxist, struc­ turalist, semiotic, deconstructive, hermeneutic, and phenomenological). Fortunately, the individual essays are often superb. Culler, who heads the field, decides to ignore the issue of literariness and introduces instead pos­ sible implications of the meaning of “identity” as sameness and individu­ ality. Criticizing Cleanth Brooks’s reading of “The Canonization” for its interpretation of the poem as an exemplary “well-wrought urn,” he con­ cludes that “ Perhaps in the end, the literary text is interesting because it doesn’t have anything as defining as an identity” (14-15). Culler presents one of the extreme positions in the volume, one which undermines the idea of an integral, secure textual identity, of a unique, identifiable coherence of form and meaning. J. Hillis Miller, in “Topography and Tropography in Thomas Hardy’s In Front of the Landscape,” outlines a similar position. His argument is ingenious, but his rather overwrought — instead of wellwrought — interpretation of Hardy’s poem is based on a Derridean concept of “ translation” exercised almost to the breaking point. Patricia Parker, equally suspicious of controllable textual identities, offers one of the most remarkable readings in the book (“The (Self-)Identity of the Literary Text: Property, Propriety, Proper Place, and Proper Name in Wuthering Heights” ) , with a new approach to Bronte’s novel as “one of those nine­ teenth-century texts which...